History

Lilith is a white-eyed demon[1] who was at one point human. She is the first demon to ever be created, her soul having been twisted by Lucifer as an act of spite against God after he was expelled from Heaven.[2] As such, she preceded both the Princes of Hell and the Knights of Hell.[3] Due to her status as the first demon, she is the last of the 66 Seals, with her death breaking the last seal and releasing Lucifer from the Cage he was imprisoned in for her creation.[4]

Originally, Lilith is imprisoned deep in Hell.[4] On Lucifer's command, Azazel arranges for her escape through the Devil's Gate in Wyoming.[5] After Azazel's death, Lilith asserts herself as the new leader of the army of demons he'd released and orders them to kill Sam Winchester, her "competition" as Azazel's successor.[1] Using her position as the Queen of the Crossroads[6] with ultimate authority over all deals and contracts, Lilith manipulates a desperate Bela with the false promise of freeing her from her deal and has Bela doom herself by pitting her against the Winchesters.[7] Lilith arranges the Colt to be taken from the Winchesters, apparently sending her right-hand man and lover, Crowley, to collect the Colt from Bela, and leaving it in his possession after he has.[8]

When Sam and Dean attack Lilith in attempt to kill her and break Dean's contract in order to save his soul from his deal (with Bela having informed them that Lilith holds his contract[7]), she captures them instead and kills Dean in front of Sam by setting a hellhound on him, sending Dean's soul to Hell.[9] At this point, she begins breaking the seals, starting with her having Alastair push Dean into breaking the first seal.[10] Meanwhile, Ruby manipulates Sam and strengthens his demonic powers on Lilith's orders, preparing him to kill Lilith and break the final seal. Eventually, at St. Mary's Convent, Lilith allows Sam to kill her and in doing so free Lucifer.[4]

Characteristics

Lilith has white eyes (including pupils and irises). Her true face is not shown, but Dean describes it as being "awful" when he sees it due to his approaching deadline. Lilith has an affinity for possessing preadolescent girls and is thus far the only demon known to possess children, though she also enjoys possessing "grown-up and pretty" women.[1][9][11] She is a skilled torturer,[12] finding it fun to physically torture people before killing them or possess a young girl to terrify and kill her family.[13][9] In addition to possessing children, she has a habit of drinking the blood of newborn babies kidnapped from maternity wards by her "personal chef".[11][2] She is knowledgeable of powerful spells, as she is credited for the Rise of the Witnesses.[13]

Powers and Abilities

Can emanate a blast of explosive white energy from her palm that can decimate structures and presumably anyone caught in the way.[1] She has great control over this power, able to prevent it from affecting specific targets whilst destroying others.[13]

Holds the contracts to all deals made by Crossroads Demons and can therefore break whichever ones she pleases,[7] as Queen of the Crossroads.[6] In addition to holding all contracts, Lilith has the authority to make deals of her own. Unusually, she claims that a deal with her will take a sexual act to seal it rather than the kiss typical to all other demons.[11]

Can pull other demons from their meatsuits and send them back to Hell.[9] Conversely, she can also send demons in Hell onto Earth.[12]

Can burn things by touch. Lilith can also control the intensity of this power; in one instance, her lips audibly burn Sam's when she kisses him but he doesn't appear to be hurt afterwards,[9] and in another, a touch from her fingers disintegrates part of a devil's trap.[11]

The demonpossessingTammi Benton makes the first reference to Lilith—though not by name—when she tells Sam that a new leader for Azazel's demon army has risen "in the west." She calls Lilith "the one who's gonna tear this world apart," and reveals that Lilith doesn't like Sam, wanting him dead because he is a potential rival for leadership of the army that Lilith wants for herself. As she supports Lilith being her leader, Tammi tries to kill Sam and Dean in an effort to please her master, but is stopped by Ruby and is ultimately killed by Dean. Interestingly, Tammi consistently refers to Lilith as an "it" instead of a "she" when talking about her with Sam.

When Sam and Dean are captured by the FBI and held at a local police station, they find themselves under siege by a horde of demons. When Ruby shows up to help, she explains that the demons are trying to kill Sam at Lilith's command, revealing that Lilith has succeeded in taking over as the new leader of Azazel's demon army. Ruby is the first character to name Lilith.

At the end of the siege, a woman and her daughter enter the station. The girl approaches Nancy Fitzgerald and calmly and politely asks her if she has seen two brothers, describing Sam as "really tall" and Dean as "really cute." When Nancy asks the girl her name, the girl is revealed to be possessed by Lilith. She raises her hand, and the entire station is besieged by white light and the terrified screams of its occupants. Later, when Ruby tells Sam and Dean to turn on the news, it is revealed that the station had been destroyed and everyone who had still been inside it when Lilith arrived had been killed. Based on the size of the explosion that'd wiped the station out, Ruby surmises that Lilith had come in person to destroy it and slay the people at the station after getting tipped off by a demon who had escaped Sam and Dean's mass-exorcism. Ruby gives Sam and Dean hex bags that will throw Lilith off their trail.

At the end of the episode, Bela reveals that Lilith told her about Dean's deal and that Lilith had claimed to hold the contracts to every deal, including Dean's and Bela's. She also reveals that she had stolen the Colt to bargain with Lilith but that it hadn't been enough; Lilith wanted her to kill Sam, too. Bela tells Dean all of this in the hope that Dean will be able to kill Lilith.

Sam and Dean plan to kill Lilith to save Dean from his deal. With Bobby's assistance, they discover that she is in New Harmony, Indiana, on what Ruby refers to as "shore leave." Lilith has possessed another little girl, killed the girl's "mean old babysitter" and left the elderly woman's corpse to rot in the hallway, and is terrorizing the girl's family (the Fremonts) while her demons possess the neighborhood to keep watch. After killing a pet named Freckles for being "mean" to her, Lilith walks in on the Fremonts discussing whether or not they should try to try to escape. She asks what they were talking about, but they hastily change the subject. Her meatsuit's father asks if she will let them go and her demeanor become icy—she wants to know why they want to leave, and suggests menacingly that they don’t love her anymore and that they shouldn't upset her or she will kill them. After a pause, she cheerfully accepts their apology and asks the father to push her on the swings outside. She later has them celebrate her birthday again (it is implied that she has been making them celebrate it everyday). She casually asks the grandfather why he asked a neighbor for help earlier. She calls him a liar when he feigns innocence, then turns her attention to the parents and demands to know if they knew. They lie that they didn't and when the grandfather pleads for help, Lilith snaps his neck with telekinesis before warning the terrified parents not to scream because it'll irritate her. Later that night, she forces the mother to curl up in bed with her and read her the same story over and over again.

Sam, Dean, and Ruby enter the Fremont household after Bobby has barred Lilith's demons from coming to her aid by setting the water sprinklers to go off with holy water. Sam finds the girl asleep with her mother awake beside her. The mother begs Sam to kill her daughter as Sam approaches, but right as Sam is about to kill the girl with Ruby's knife, Dean calls him off; as he temporarily has the ability to see the true faces of demons, he knows Lilith is no longer possessing the little girl. Sam entreats Ruby to teach him to use his powers to kill Lilith and save Dean, but she tells him that it's too late to do that now. As a hellhound comes for Dean, the trio barricade themselves in the house's office. When Ruby is trying to convince Sam to give her her knife back so that she can try to use it to fend off the hellhound, Dean suddenly notices the difference in the demon's true face from how it looked earlier, and realizes that the woman previously possessed by Ruby is now possessed by Lilith. She uses telekinesis to pin Sam to a wall and Dean to a table, and indicates that she sent Ruby to Hell before taking the other demon's meatsuit for herself. Remarking that she likes possessing the woman because "it's all grown-up and pretty," she forces a kiss on Sam before she rejects his attempt to trade his life for Dean's, taunting him that he doesn't have anything that she wants. She ignores Dean's desperate attempt to buy time by getting her to talk, instead setting the hellhound on him and watching on with amusement as it mauls Dean to death. Lilith turns her power on Sam, but it has no effect and she quickly vacates her meatsuit when Sam goes to attack her with Ruby's knife.

Dean asks Sam how he had survived when Lilith had been trying to kill him; Sam tells him how she tried to kill him with her light and had fled when he was immune to it. Later, Ruby tells Sam that not even Lilith can resurrect a human in Hell.

When arguing about whether or not Castiel is a real angel, Sam points out that even Lilith is scared of Ruby's knife. Henriksen's ghost reveals that instead of killing everyone in the police station in 3.12 Jus in Bello right away, Lilith had entertained herself by torturing them all for forty-five minutes first, skinning Nancy alive and saving Henriksen for last. Towards the end of the episode, Castiel tells Dean that it was Lilith who raised the Witnesses, and explains that she had done so to break one of the 66 Seals; when the last one is broken, Lucifer will be freed. Castiel attributes her choice in Witnesses to her twisted sense of humor.

When infected with ghost sickness, Dean has a hallucination of Lilith, who is happy to see him, having "missed" him. She reveals that four months is equivalent to forty years in Hell and that Dean remembers every moment of it. She admits that she is not real, but says that it doesn't matter because Dean is still going to die and go back to Hell. She tells Dean to listen to his heart and screams "ba-boom!" in rhythm with his heartbeats, making his heart beat faster and faster, but Dean is cured of ghost sickness before he can die of a heart attack.

In flashbacks set after 3.16 No Rest for the Wicked but before 4.01 Lazarus Rising, Ruby claims that Lilith tortured her in Hell as punishment for helping Sam. Ruby endures Lilith's "creative" torments and tries desperately to convince Lilith that she is repentant and can now be trusted; eventually, Lilith gives Ruby the opportunity to escape further torture by finding and killing Sam for her. Ruby agrees, and Lilith sets her free and sends her back to Earth. Instead of fulfilling her part of the deal once she found Sam, however, Ruby again betrays Lilith by teaching Sam to use his powers so that he can kill Lilith and avenge Dean. A month after they begin training, Sam finds omens of Lilith's presence and decides to go after her despite Ruby telling him that he isn't ready to fight Lilith yet. He walks into a trap Lilith had set up, but Lilith herself is not there—the demons who ambush Sam tell him that she couldn't make it, though she wanted to. Lilith's plan is foiled by Ruby saving Sam.

In the present, Anna tries to explain to her psychiatrist that Lilith is breaking the 66 Seals, revealing that the angels cannot stop Lilith because there are so many potential seals to defend and no one knows which ones Lilith will target next. When Sam and Dean visit the mental hospital, they find that one of Anna's sketches depicts Lilith (using another little girl for a meatsuit) raising the Witnesses from 4.02 Are You There, God? It's Me, Dean Winchester.

Ruby tells Sam that Lilith has already broken thirty-four of the 66 Seals. As Sam is the only one who can kill Lilith, Ruby urges Sam to focus his efforts on finding and killing Lilith to "cut the head off the snake" and stop the seal-breaking. Although Sam is still set on killing Lilith, however, he doesn't want to use what Ruby says is the only way he can do it (later revealed to be drinking demon blood). At the end of the episode, he finally gives in.

Ruby is working on tracking Lilith down and has arranged for Sam and Dean to meet up with her to follow through on some leads; they are traveling to get to their meeting spot when Castiel and Uriel kidnap Dean to interrogate Alastair for them. Alastair reveals that the reason Lilith had wanted Dean in Hell in the first place was so that he could break the first of The 66 Seals by torturing other souls. Alastair also reveals that Lilith is not behind the angel murders; if she were able to kill angels, she would've killed a thousand instead of just seven.

Chuck warns Sam and Dean that Lilith is coming, and predicts that she and Sam will have sex. Dean wants to leave immediately to avoid Lilith, but Sam insists on confronting her. She eventually appears to him when he is alone in his and Dean's motel room. Instead of her usual little girl meatsuits, she is possessing a dental hygienist from Bloomington, Indiana. She breaks the devil's trap Sam laid down to capture her by touching it and burning a portion of it away, and when he tries to kill her with his powers, she is barely affected, commenting that he is "strong, but not that strong." Likewise, she is unable to kill him with her powers.

Lilith reveals that she has come to make a deal with Sam; she will stop breaking The 66 Seals, but only in return for Sam and Dean's lives. When Sam questions why Lilith would want to stop breaking seals, she reveals that she is destined to die right before the Apocalypse is set in motion. Sam still hesitates and Lilith calls him selfish for valuing his life over those of six billion innocent people, before suggesting that his selfishness comes from the Demon Blood in him, goading Sam into agreeing to her deal. She beckons him to the bed to seal the deal with sex, but as he lies down and embraces her, he grabs Ruby's knife in order to kill her. She overpowers him and seizes the knife, but before she can do anything else, Dean arrives with Chuck in tow. Dean warns her to leave before the archangel tasked with protecting Chuck (possibly Raphael) comes and kills her. Though reluctant to leave her business with Sam unfinished, Lilith heeds Dean's words and vacating the body she is possessing, leaving the dental hygienist motionless on the floor. When Dean asks Sam whether he would've taken the deal, Sam denies it, as he suspects that Lilith would've found some way to "weasel out of it." He does note that she's scared of something and that she was right about dying before the Apocalypse, because he plans to make sure of it.

Sam tells Dean that he is drinking Demon Blood to get strong enough to kill Lilith, but Dean says that he and Bobby will kill her instead while they keep Sam locked in Bobby's Panic Room. Later, Ruby reveals that Lilith is "Lucifer's first"—the first demon created from a human, and the only one who can break the last of the 66 Seals. She also reveals that Lilith has a "personal chef" who kidnaps babies for her to eat and is currently possessingCindy McClellan. Sam and Ruby decide to capture the demon in order to interrogate her for Lilith's whereabouts so that they can kill Lilith before she breaks the last seal.

In a flashback to 1972, Azazel communicates with Lucifer after sacrificing six nuns in a chapel in St. Mary's Convent in Ilchester, Maryland, the seventh nun serving as Lucifer's mouthpiece. Lucifer tells Azazel that Lilith is needed for him to be released, and when Azazel notes that Lilith is trapped deep in Hell, Lucifer tells Azazel how he can free her, starting with instructions to find "a very special child." This scene implies (and Eric Kripke's commentary on the episode confirms) that Azazel had had the Devil's Gate opened in 2.22 All Hell Breaks Loose: Part Two for the sole purpose of freeing Lilith so that she could break The 66 Seals.

In the present, the demonpossessingCindy McClellan is reluctant to give Sam and Ruby information on Lilith for fear that Lilith will kill her. When Sam tortures her, however, she reveals that Lilith will be at St. Mary's Convent the following night to break the last of seals, though this is all that she knows regarding the last seal. Lilith once again possesses the dental hygienist, and she and her minions set up the destruction of the final seal at St. Mary's Convent. Sam and Ruby later arrive at the convent, kill Lilith's minions, and attack Lilith herself, with Sam pinning her to the altar with telekinesis while trying to kill her with his powers, to no avail. Meanwhile, Dean learns that the angels have been allowing Lilith to break the seals because they want the Apocalypse to happen for their own ends, and that Lilith's death itself is the final seal that, should it come to pass, will release Lucifer. Castiel has a change of heart and sends Dean to stop Sam from killing Lilith, but Ruby bars Dean from entering the chapel. Lilith laughs at Sam's hesitation at the sound of Dean's voice, and taunts him about turning himself into a monster by drinking Demon Blood, which pushes Sam to finally finish her off, thus breaking the last seal. Blood issues from her dead meatsuit's mouth and forms the entrance to Lucifer's Cage which Lucifer then rises from. Ruby triumphantly reveals to Sam that she has secretly been working as Lilith's double-agent all along and that it had been on Lilith's orders that she manipulated him and tricked him into breaking the last seal, explaining that Lilith and Azazel had done everything they did in order to get Sam to this point. Furthermore, Ruby reveals that Lilith had been the only one who knew her true loyalty.

Lilith's corpse is briefly visible on the floor of St. Mary's Convent before Lucifer's light grows too bright to see anything else. Later, Lilith herself is mentioned by Sam when he tells Bobby that he had released Lucifer by killing her.

At the end of the episode, Lilith is mentioned by Dean when he admits that, although he still doesn't approve of Sam having drank Demon Blood to do it, he is glad that Sam managed to kill her and he knows that Sam hadn't known at the time that her death was the last seal. Sam reminds him that his killing her had started the Apocalypse, but Dean points out that neither of them could have foreseen that killing Lilith would turn out to be a bad thing.

Lilith is mentioned by Becky, an avid fan of the Supernatural Books. Becky discloses to Sam that, contrary to what they had believed, Bela had given the Colt to Lilith's "right-hand man," Crowley, not Lilith herself. Becky has the impression that, as well as her servant, Crowley was Lilith's lover.

Crowley mentions Lilith when listing off those who underestimated the threat the Winchesters pose and paid the price for it, which may hint that Crowley (and possibly other demons) is not aware that Lilith had in fact purposefully arranged (largely through Ruby) for her own death at Sam's hand. More simply, Crowley may have been forgetting or glossing over this information so that he could group her in with Lucifer, Michael, Azazel, and Alastair as the powerful enemies the Winchesters had faced and defeated, in order to help make his point to Castiel.

In a flashback set four years before the episode, Sam and Dean are trying to track Lilith down. They interrogate a demonpossessingJeffrey and he eventually reveals that she has a lieutenant, Merrick, who is stationed in New Orleans, Louisiana. For giving the Winchesters this information, the demon is imprisoned deep in Hell after Sam and Dean exorcise him.

When Sam is trying to figure out what sins to confess to purify his blood, Dean lists off various off-color things Sam has been involved in. One of the items he lists is how Sam had killed Lilith, alluding to how Sam had freed Lucifer and triggered the Apocalypse.

Lilith in Myth and Religion

The demonLilith is one of the most infamous in demonology. In ancient Hebrew tradition Lilith is depicted as Adam's first companion, created equally to Adam from the dust of the earth. She objected to being subservient to Adam though and was replaced as his wife by the more complacent Eve. In revenge for this, Lilith has a particular dislike of children. In medieval Europe, Lilith was variously the wife, concubine or grandmother of Satan or Lucifer.

According to Hebrew tradition, the Lilin are Lilith's daughters and are dangerous demonic entities, considered in Hebraic writings to be the children born to Lilith after her escape from the garden of Eden.

The etymology of lilith strongly points towards an association with night and with air, and later translations of the Bible have referred to Lilith as a "screech owl."

Within Paganism, Lilith has various standings. For followers of Wicca, Lilith tends to be seen as one of many names for the Goddess, the supreme feminine divine power. For other polytheistic Pagans, Lilith is often seen as a misunderstood deity or entity, an example of the denigrated feminine as the patriarchy gained prominence. She is often seen as:

A fertility goddess; on leaving the garden of Eden, Lilith was thought to have given birth to a hundred children a day.

A goddess of unrepressed sexuality; the example of a woman at her sensual peak.

A goddess of air and night; in the King James Bible, Lilith is referred to as the 'screech owl' and the etymology of her name indicates air related abilities and her region of power is in the night time.

A dark goddess; similar to the Hindu dark goddess, Kali-Ma, embodying the dark-side of the feminine.

A goddess of witches; in a role similar to that of the goddess Hekate of the Greek pantheon.